Just to be clear, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of Gabbard, but the "she palled around with a brutal dictator!!!!" talking point -- which unites hordes of angry liberals and neocons against her -- is pure propagandistic nonsense https://t.co/5hVhmfahes

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You are far more powerful than you've ever imagined. I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, it's just a fact. ~

Since society is made of narrative, it is far more malleable than it appears at first glance. You can become an artist just by making that the narrative about you, and if you move in that direction in a confident and assertive way you will see doors begin to open up as people say "Oh it's okay, he's an artist, let him in." You can escape from seemingly inescapable living situations and free yourself from seemingly insurmountable obstacles just by pushing in whatever direction you desire with full, confident intention. Since nobody really knows what's going on and everyone's making it up as they go along, we tend to take our cues from the most confident-looking people in the room, so people will say "Oh, she seems like she knows where she's going. I'd better get out of her way." Just hold the positive intention and move toward it like you've already gotten where you want to be. ~

The self is an illusion; it's a mental construct and linguistic convention with no solid object in the center. What most people think of as "me" is a bunch of habitual mental "I" noises swirling around in consciousness, with no hard, solid object that could be called a self anywhere to be found. Thoughts and feelings are happening and a body is moving around in the world, but no one's doing any of it. Look within for the self and the search will turn up nothing but motes of stardust. Mental habits are much easier to undo when this is deeply grokked.

Excerpt from "Nothing In Any Conspiracy Theory Is As Bad As What’s Being Done Out In The Open":

The lack of any sense of proportion in response to the Khashoggi case compared to the destruction of civilian lives in Yemen has been roundly criticized by anyone with a public platform and open eyes, and rightly so; obviously a government murdering a journalist in cold blood would be a terrible thing, but to hold that as more worthy of attention than the anguished deaths of untold tens of thousands is obscene.

This dynamic is also not unique to Saudi human rights violations. Take the ongoing Russiagate conspiracy theory, for example. Even if Mueller’s investigation did somehow prove that Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election (and it won’t), that act would still have been far less horrible than the ongoing cold war escalations that this administration has been continually advancing against a nuclear superpower. The existence of every single organism on this planet has been placed in jeopardy by Trump’s idiotic, unforgivable, still very much ongoing game of nuclear chicken with Russia, but hardly anyone ever talks about it. They focus on an empty conspiracy theory instead, partly because it is the mass media’s job to manufacture support for warmongering while downplaying its risks, and partly because theoretical conspiracies draw more attention than the things our rulers are doing right out in the open.